


become undisguised

by owlinaminor



Category: 1917 (Movie 2019)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Established Relationship, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-18
Updated: 2020-07-18
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:07:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,832
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25362880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/owlinaminor/pseuds/owlinaminor
Summary: What did you do after the war, Ellis Leslie?
Relationships: Joseph Blake/Lieutenant Leslie
Comments: 9
Kudos: 34





	become undisguised

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nightcalling](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nightcalling/gifts).



> somehow, this was inspired by iris' au fic [you’re in my head, you’re in my blood](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25209874). ily iris, i hope i did your boys justice.
> 
> this can vaguely fit into my [keep hold verse](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1691131) if you want it to, though it is much less polished. title and epigraph are from whitman's [song of myself](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45477/song-of-myself-1892-version).

> _I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked.  
>  I am mad for it to be in contact with me._

What did you do after the war, Ellis Leslie?

Drank less, for one thing. Oh, he’s still drinking, still carries a flask in his coat pocket, still pulls it out when the night is dark or the bar only serves shit beer. But he forgets to fill it, sometimes. He keeps a bottle of whiskey on the windowsill by his bed, and sometimes it is weeks after he empties it that he remembers to buy another.

They ask him about the war. They—the women at the market, the girls at the bar, the old men who come into the bookshop looking for poetry or instruction manuals, looking to build chests or live longer. They see the medal pinned on his jacket, and they want to know. Was it hard? Were the trenches as cold and muddy as they say? Who did you lose?

“It was cold,” he answers. Drawls it out, like he’s standing on a stage, trying to buy time because he forgot the rest of the speech. “It was muddy. It was always too loud, or too quiet.”

He speaks like that, noncommittal, until they leave him alone. It’s always the young girls who ask the most, leaning in close and raising a hand like they want to run their delicate little fingers over his medal, like they could reach through his jacket and find the dirt of the trenches, still lingering beneath.

“Why do you wear the medal?” Blake asks when he’s visiting one day, leaning on the counter. Drawing all the sunlight in his farm boy overalls, his shirtsleeves rolled up. “If you hate it when they ask questions.”

“It’s worse when I don’t,” Ellis replies.

Without the medal, the questions grow colder. Or they aren’t spoken but linger in the air, like frost on a December morning. Where were you. Who did you kill. What did you do for your country.

What did you do for your country, Ellis Leslie?

Drank, spilled whiskey, gave sacraments. Sent boys off to their deaths and brought their bodies back. He wishes he could forget it all, sometimes, or that he could trade his story with one of those heroes in the leather-bound volumes. Odysseus had nightmares, probably, but the narrative doesn’t mention them.

What did you do for your country, Joseph Blake? Ellis whispers it, one of those nights when staying up is easier, traces the shape of his medal into Blake’s shoulder. He is quieter like this, and it always seems strange. His curls loose across his forehead, not tucked under a helmet or a cap. His brow smooth, the wrinkles at the edge of his eyes fainter. His skin, soft porcelain in the moonlight, shifting color with the trees and the wind outside the glass windowpanes. Ellis lets his hand drop down to Blake’s chest, his stomach, his hips. Hard from years of sowing seeds and lifting hay bales, soft from his mother’s cooking. Ellis rests his palm at the center of Blake’s chest, thumb and forefinger spread, and keeps it there until he can hear Blake’s heartbeat.

Ellis might be imagining it, but he thinks Blake’s breathing shifts, at the touch.

The first letter arrived while Ellis was still recovering from the flu, so he spent a week thinking he’d hallucinated the damn thing. _Lt. Leslie,_ it read. _I believe my brother is in your regiment now. Take care of him._ Along with various and sundry other pleasantries and veiled invitations. Ellis knows, he has the scrap of paper still in his bookcase, tucked between his volume of Marlowe and his Whitman, _Leaves of Grass._

He wonders, sometimes, if the letter arrived too slowly—it came the week after he met Blake the younger, a character out of some romantic epic, so much a caricature that he might as well be carrying a sword and a red rose. Hero on a mission. Would Ellis have stopped the boy, if he’d known? Would the 2nd Devons have advanced from Croisilles Wood? He has nightmares about it. That, and everything else.

Blake wakes him from the nightmares. In the bed in Ellis’ tiny flat above the shop and in the shop itself, when all the refusing to sleep at night catches up to him and he nods off over the counter, forehead hitting the keys of the cash register.

That’s how Blake finds him, the summer after the war. Comes in looking for a new cookbook for his mother, jabs Ellis in the elbow, and then startles back as Ellis wakes—stares at Ellis so long, he thinks he must still be dreaming.

Blake leaves town three days later, no cookbook in tow.

Time works differently, after the war. During, it was this long, fluid thing, like whiskey, you can drown in it but don’t come up for air unless you want your head to ache. After, it’s more precise. Regimented. There are days, and days become months, and months, almost impudently, march along into years.

Ellis buys a calendar and tacks it to his bathroom mirror, just to keep up. He writes stupid things in the spaces between the numbers. Book shipments, groceries, bits of poetry. He never writes down Blake’s visits—doesn’t need to. (And it’s easier, some part of his brain always whispers, to pretend you forgot someone was supposed to come.)

The visits are the same, and they aren’t. Blake comes for three days, between helping his mother on the farm. He swaggers into the shop and asks for something he knows they don’t carry. Ellis kicks him out. Blake swaggers back in and asks for something he knows they do carry, but only in the back room on a special shelf, kept locked with a key that Ellis stashes under the register. Ellis kicks him out again. Blake swaggers in a third time, quotes Emerson or Keats or something else he half-remembers Ellis whispering at twilight. Ellis kicks everyone else out and closes shop for the rest of the day.

Ellis can’t keep the shop closed forever, but when the customers are slow and the light is good, Blake perches up on the shop counter. He pages through volumes while Ellis does inventory, never going slowly enough to truly read them. Sometimes, after Ellis locks up and the sunset blooms pink past the windows, Blake lies down on his back on that wood counter, displacing all the ledgers and receipts and piles of recommended reading, balances some thin volume on his nose and asks Ellis questions about nothing. Favorite color. First memory. Why you joined the war.

Ellis joined the war because he was bored. The bookshop was always the same, the pages all ran into each other. He sat up in the middle of the night staring at a blank notebook, pen hovering. He thought—well, he didn’t think. His legs ached for want of somewhere to run. And six months later, he was on his back in the mud, wishing for boredom.

It’s an unfair question, Blake must know this when he asks it. Blake joined the war because it was easy: expected. Ellis doesn’t have to ask. He saw Tom’s eyes when he said he was going to save his brother. He sees Tom, younger, shining under a wide blue sky, the same dazed expression and arms always reaching, wanting his brother to be a hero so that he could follow in those footsteps.

But Blake is no storybook hero, not like this. Swinging slowly up from the counter, pulling Ellis in by the edge of his tie. He’s cast red-gold in the sunset, sure, but he is heavier. His shoes, where they land on the old, food floor: they carry weight.

They go upstairs for dinner, and they talk about glory. Or the shadow of glory, if it’s useful. What war means when nobody knows why they’re dying.

“There used to be Crusades,” Ellis says, “there was religious fervor, people thought they were on a mission from God.”

“Yes,” Blake says, “but they still died.”

Ellis reads aloud from the books on his shelf, opens them one by one until he has lost track of where each one is supposed to sit, all the spines shoved over together or sprawled across the sheets. Blake tries to remember speeches, from the battlefield. Things that generals told him. Notes he read in the newspaper when he was on leave. Anything that might provide an answer.

They go in circles like this, from image to image, memory to memory, chasing each other through poppyfields until the sun starts to glow purple in the distance. Blake flops back on the mattress and recites Queen Bess at Tilbury, _I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too,_ and Ellis shouts, “What the fuck does that mean, a king of England,” and falls forward and tickles him until they’re both laughing.

One morning, Ellis wakes up to find Blake watching him.

Blake’s hair is tousled from the pillows, sun illuminating just a hint of gray in one curl. His eyes are blue, blue, so brilliant that Ellis thinks the sky itself must be a reflection, a cheap imitation.

“Come home with me,” Blake says.

“I am home,” Ellis replies.

“No,” Blake says, leaning in closer. “You’re not.”

The Blake farm is green-gold fields stretching to the horizon, sweet scent of cherries hanging in the air, cracked shingles and a wraparound porch and a vegetable garden, tucked against the side of the house, new life teeming.

Ellis gives up the bookshop. He has a cousin, she ran the place while he was in France, and she’s better at sales anyway. He can visit once a month and help with the inventory. In between, he will learn to drive a tractor, sow wheat, pick cherries, and pull carrots from the wet earth. He will bake pies with Mrs. Blake— _call me Martha—_ and he will run out across the fields with Blake— _it’s been years, Ellis, for God’s sake, call me Joe._ He will arrange his books in a careful stack by the bed, and he will scribble in the margins, and he will doze off with his head on Joe’s shoulder and he will sleep, sleep, so tired from work that his mind has no room for nightmares.

And he will wake, and he will look at Joe, and he will say, _you’re right, you were always right, I’m home._

What did you do for your country, Ellis Leslie? Oh, stayed alive, I suppose. Ate, drank, dug my own latrines. Wrote letters and poems and forgot them all after. Dragged bodies back so that the resting place you told their mothers wouldn’t be a lie.

And what did you do after the war?

Oh, now that— _that—_ is none of your damn business.

**Author's Note:**

> [twitter](https://twitter.com/owlinaminor) / [tumblr](https://owlinaminor.tumblr.com/)


End file.
